Princeton Researcher Uses AI to Match Georgia Voters to Their Ballots

Max Springer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, used an AI coding agent and public records to reconstruct the casting order of 1.52 million ballots from Georgia's May 2026 primary, as he detailed in a university blog post. That is 98.9% of in person ballots in the 114 of 139 counties where he found the order could be recovered.

Springer did not discover the flaw. He pointed the agent at an October 2022 research paper showing that the scanners' supposedly random ballot numbering is deterministic and can be reversed, then gave it two public files: each county's early voting list and the cast vote record. He wrote that within a couple of hours he had a working pipeline, and that at no point did the agent refuse or raise concerns.

Those two files alone uniquely tied about 1% of analysed early in person voters to a ballot. Adding each location's public scanner audit log and check in records went much further. In Heard County, the agent matched the majority of 650 early in person voters to a specific ballot and the rest to within a single swap, and the result held across all 1,860 early voters at the Ball Ground vote center in Cherokee County.

A corrected software version was certified in March 2023. Springer recommends that jurisdictions using Dominion scanners install version 5.17 or newer, and argues that AI coding tools have removed the expertise that once kept vulnerabilities like this one from being exploited.

The Associated Press reported on 13 September that Dominion has since been sold and renamed Liberty Vote, and that Georgia is the only state using the system statewide. According to the AP, the secretary of state's office will black out problematic information in records released to the public and is working with a vendor to scramble the original order, while the State Election Board rejected a proposal that would have required the office to apply the manufacturer's recommended update, with some members citing the short timeline before the November midterms. The AP noted that the flaw does not allow votes to be changed.